8/29/01

A federal appeals court overturned the expulsion of a Little Rock
junior high school student who wrote a provocative rap that described
plans to rape, sodomize and kill a seventh-grade classmate who broke
up with him. The court ruled that the boy's rap was not a "true
threat," and was thus protected by the First Amendment.
An official for the school district said that if necessary, they'd
make the same decision again in order to prevent "another Columbine."

A New York Times editorial criticized President Bush for
operating his chainsaw while on vacation in Texas without using the
protective helmet and Kevlar logging chaps required for forestry
workers by the Forest Service Health and Safety Handbook. Editors of
the Times, skilled outdoorsmen all, also advised using a
"wraparound mesh face-mask and... aggressive hearing protection."

The Times cited a statistic from the Consumer Product Safety
Commission, that 44,000 chainsaw users require hospitalization
annually. But the appropriately named Smartertimes.com notes
that the agency's actual figure from 1999 was 26,711. Despite the
illusion of precision, that figure was determined by extrapolating
from a survey of 100 emergency rooms from a total of 546 emergency
room visits. Of those visits, only 2.6 percent required actual
hospitalization. The statistic also includes any injury that involved
a chainsaw but was not directly caused by it, such as having a tree
fall on you.

8/28/01

Repelled by harshly critical language focused on Israel, the Bush
administration announced that Secretary of State Colin Powell would
not be attending the upcoming United Nations Conference on Racism,
to be held in South Africa.

Disappointed by Powell's decision, Gerald LeMelle of Amnesty International
said: "There has been no serious thought as to the role the United
States could play. Who is going to start leading us away from racial
strife in Rwanda, Burundi, Kosovo, Cincinnati?"

In Great Britain, John Dixon, a 54-year-old supervisor who worked for
11 years at Parkside Flexible Packaging at Stourton, Leeds, a firm
that provides printed wrapping material for tobacco products, was
fired for violating the company's strict no-smoking policy. At the
end of a night shift, a video camera recorded a flash of light in his
car just before he left the parking lot.

8/23/01

A letter to the Wall Street Journal's online editorial website,
opinionjournal.com,
from Amy Wheeler of San Francisco, August 23, 2001. Ms. Wheeler
comments on guidelines issued by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
(GLAAD) for how to refer to a proposed transsexual character on the
television series "The Education of Max Bickford" (in brief, use
female pronouns without quotation marks). In response to GLAAD,
editors had asked the rhetorical question: "How is it that we are
supposed to believe 'sexual orientation' is immutable and genetically
determined, while sex itself can be altered by a surgeon's scalpel?"

As a transsexual who is definitely not a part of the
"homosexual-transgender community," I was amused at your comments
comparing the claims of homosexuals regarding their own aberrant
condition with the concept that gender can be changed by surgically
altering physical characteristics. I could have been reading you
incorrectly, but I detected some skepticism about the legitimacy of
a homosexual group purporting to represent transsexuals, who, as a
group, have the same generally heterosexual perspective on sexual
behavior that most of the world's people share.

If my interpretation is right, you're entirely justified in raising
the question. For the past decade or so, homosexuals have been
claiming to speak for or otherwise represent transsexuals. This has
occurred primarily to add numbers to the community of weirdos that
homosexuals try to represent as politically formidable. Most
transsexuals strongly reject this attempt to "grandfather" us into
their socio-political paradigm.

The truth is that homosexuals are no less likely than right-wing
Christians to discriminate against transsexuals.

Another truth is that transsexuals, unlike homosexuals, acknowledge
that the condition that affects us is, indeed, abnormal, to the point
where radical treatment prescribed by medical and mental health
professionals is required to ameliorate the condition's negative
effects. Transsexuals, also unlike homosexuals, do not hope that
tomorrow there will be even more people like us, so as to create a
wonderful new world full of... people who genuinely believe they have
the "birth defect" of incorrect gender characteristics. That would
be a crazy new world, wouldn't it?

I hope you and your cohorts at The Wall Street Journal don't associate
transsexuals too closely with homosexuals, regardless of claims made
by homosexual organizations or individuals. The advice given by GLAAD
seems to incorporate no special knowledge of transsexualism, just some
common sense about how to treat others with respect. Do you really
need a group of homosexuals, who routinely refer even to their
supporters as "fag hags," to lecture you on respecting others? I
don't think so. I hope you don't, either.

8/21/01

America Online
shut down a wildly controversial chat group promoting the view that
anorexia is not a deadly disease but rather a lifestyle choice
deserving of understanding, much like... well... obesity.

[Ed.: Reporting on the controversy, ABC News
notes that 10 percent of those with anorexia nervosa die from it. Simply
put, this number is made up. At this point, one could even make a case that
any time 10 percent is quoted as a statistic on the news, it is
false.]

I read with interest yesterday's front-page article, "Porn is hot
course on campus." As an English major in college, I took courses
similar to those described in the article, and suffered the derision
of many classmates and others who were enrolled in "real" education.

What courses such as "Cross-Dressing in Literature and Film" taught
me went way beyond writing a paper for a grade or classroom
theorization. I learned to examine daily events—riding in a subway
train, eating in a crowded cafeteria—for lessons in cultural,
societal, sexual, and gender identity. I learned to look beyond the
surface of what is being said or done to establish intent.

These lessons I have continued to use throughout my life, in job
interviews, dealing with colleagues, even the dating world. I've
never identified an igneous rock or debated Dickens [sic] imagery
in my daily life. Pornography and sexuality are part of our
everyday—every moment—lives.

—Kelsey Miller
Belmont

[Ed.: The cross-dressing class has Harvard's
Marjorie Garber written all over it.]

8/20/01

Peter Lehman, a humanities professor at Arizona State University
who has run workshops on teaching pornography, had a printing shop
refuse to copy his course packet. He now requires all students taking
his class on "Sexuality in the Media" to sign a consent form.

PBS President and CEO Pat Mitchell, after being asked to name the most
under-reported news story of the week, on CNN's
"Greenfield at Large," August 10, 2001:

Well, certainly the weather has been the headline, but what's troubled
me is that the press hasn't gone beyond the headline very much. This
was such a great opportunity to talk about global warming and climate
change. I mean, it couldn't have been on our minds more as we were
perspiring through the heat.... That would have been the starting
point to talk about why we are in this place, why do we have 100
degree temperatures and what can we do about it?

In front of reporters, the Pontiff called the creation of embryos for
research a symbol of a, quote, "tragic coarsening of consciences"...
Determining the right thing to do on stem cell research has not been
so easy for Mr. Bush, and today the Pope only made it harder.

Some thoughts as the President decides whether or not the government
should back stem cell research. History's longest argument has been
over what to do about the mountain. One group has always wanted to
cross the mountain, to explore and see what is on the other side. The
other group, no less sincere, has always been willing to let well
enough alone. That group worries there might be things on the other
side of the mountain we didn't want to know. They were the ones who
refused to look through Galileo's telescope. They already knew all
they needed to know about the moon and the sun and the stars.... The
President says it is the hardest decision he will ever make, but if he
reads history, he will know that history remembers those who climbed
the mountain, not those who stayed home in fear of the unknown.

[Ed.: As it turns out, adult 'stem' cells do just as good a job of
taking on the function of other cells as embryonic cells, perhaps even
better, largely obviating the issue.]

8/19/01

Ivy Meeropol, granddaughter of communist spies Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg, describes her experiences during the late 1970's at
Kinderland, a politically progressive children's camp in Tolland,
Massachusetts, in the New York Times August 19, 2001:

Taking Kinderland's ideals into the world at large was never something
we thought of doing. For me, the place was a sanctuary. The rare,
delicate beliefs we held were reserved for camp.

If we already had a sense that almost anywhere outside was enemy
territory, it was only reinforced by some of the Kinderland cultural
programs. Many of our heroes had suffered or died for their beliefs.
The persecution of Jews, African-Americans, unionists and Communists
was often laid out in graphic detail. In their enthusiasm to impart
this knowledge, the Kinderland staff designed some hair-raising
activities. To bring home the horrors of the Holocaust, counselors
locked children in their bunks, led them into communal showers or had
them hide in an attic and read excerpts from "The Diary of Anne Frank."

One summer, some counselors wanted to set fire to the lake for
Hiroshima Day, Aug. 6, and decided not to only after a long debate.

8/16/01

A man whose blood alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit
and who crashed his Jeep in a sand pit in Londonderry, New Hampshire,
killing a friend, is now suing the couple who threw the party at which
he was served alcohol, along with the owner of the sand pit for
failure to keep drunken fools with four-wheel-drive vehicles off the
property.

8/15/01

8/14/01

A Connecticut bill that would ban talking on cell phones while driving
also makes eating or tuning the radio while driving an offense. But
let's not forget talking to passengers or allowing children in the
vehicle.

Following a class-action settlement in which the Clinton
administration agreed to pay $50,000 to each black farmer who had
suffered discrimination when applying for federal loans, 40,000 people
applied for the award. But according to the Census Bureau,
there are only 18,000 black farmers nationwide.

8/13/01

Oklahoma's Muskogee High School removed
To Kill a Mockingbird from its required reading list
because it contains racially charged language and, in the words of
principal Terry Saul, an educator, "we didn't want to put any kids in
an uncomfortable situation."

The Interior Department
is refusing an emergency listing of three insects because to do so
would threaten construction of the District of Columbia's
Woodrow Wilson Bridge project.

The department's stance angered western lawmakers, whose constituents
often face enormous restrictions on land where similar wildlife is
found. "It appears Washington, D.C., gets a special exemption when it
comes to species protection," said Senator Larry E. Craig (R-ID).
"In Washington 'nimby' means: no endangered species in my backyard."

The University of California
has had to relocate its proposed Merced campus two miles away from
its original site and is spending millions of dollars on lawyers and
environmental consultants to avoid harming fairy shrimp in vernal
pools.

8/12/01

A group of Rhode Island state legislators want to change the August 13
celebration of Victory Day to "World Peace Day" or "Governor's
Day." Bob Leddy, a local columnist who supports the effort, says
celebrating VJ Day "has the potential for keeping hatred alive by
stirring the embers of racism."

8/11/01

IQ tests are notoriously unreliable, and we all know that "IQ" does
not correspond very closely to executive ability. But the Lovenstein
Institute's conclusions about George W. Bush are nevertheless
illuminating.

The Lovenstein Institute, based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, has long
published an IQ for each new president, based on his academic
performance, writings "achieved without aid of staff," linguistic
clarity, and so on.

It's rough and ready stuff, but it awarded Bill Clinton an astonishing
IQ of 182 (the average in the U.S. today is around 104), which largely
conforms to one's previous impression that the man was useless but
brilliant....

At the other end are the Bushes. Even the father only scored 98, but
he did seem in charge of his White House. He was, after all, a man
with long service in bureaucratic wars and much foreign experience as
well. But George W. Bush has no such background, and the Lovenstein
Institute estimates his IQ at 91.... It is a harsh and an early
verdict, but maybe things are spinning out of control just because
they are smarter than he is.

A correction printed on August 11, 2001:

A column by Gwynne Dyer on Tuesday's op-ed page contained incorrect
information. The column cited a study by the Lovenstein Institute of
Scranton, Pa., that concluded President Bush had the lowest IQ of any
recent president. There is no Lovenstein Institute in Scranton, Pa.,
and no such study was conducted.

8/8/01

After a German utility slashed electricity prices by a third, one of
its customers was awarded $2,200 in a lawsuit based on his idea that
for the utility to be able to afford such a price cut, it must have
overcharged him in the past. German law requires electricity to be
sold as cheaply as possible.

In Northampton, England, Ruby Barber was ordered to remove a barbed
wire fence from around her property because it might possibly injure
someone who might "foolishly" try to climb it. Just before she put
up the fence two years earlier, she had been burglarized three times;
since then, none.

8/6/01

A Washington Post editorial, August 6, 2001:

The Virginia gubernatorial campaign has been distinguished thus far by
an almost total lack of relevance to the serious problems facing the
state. The most important of these may be an antiquated and regressive
tax system. Virginia is a relatively wealthy state, but much of the
wealth is untaxed.

Swarthmore College
agreed to allow ostensibly gay students to live in dorm rooms with
members of the opposite sex, based on the potential for same-sex
"attraction and homophobia," as one gay student leader put it.

[Ed.: Note that problems stemming from "attraction and homophobia"
have been widely dismissed as cause for concern when accommodating
gays in the military.]

Surgeon General David Satcher released a report about sex in America
that put forth at least two demonstrably false claims: first, that
"an estimated 22 percent of [American] women have been victims of
rape," and second, that "[w]e have created an environment where
there's almost a conspiracy of silence when it comes to sexuality."

8/5/01

The London Times
reports that, to help repay $5.5 billion in Soviet-era debt, the
government of North Korea is sending thousands of slave laborers to
work in closed logging camps in eastern Siberia.

And the London Telegraph
reports that anarchists who had earlier disrupted free-trade meetings
across the world from Seattle to Genoa are refusing to demonstrate at a
summit in Shanghai, China, out of fear they might be imprisoned or shot.

8/3/01

After declaring Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be
"fragile as a snowflake," former tour guide John Balzar describes
the actual terrain in the Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2001:

I remember the vista. From the 1,000-foot summit of the last foothill
of this continent: a shocking landscape. Plains, uninterrupted from
horizon to horizon. Hundreds of miles and 180 degrees of Nothing.

There is nothing like Nothing when there is almost none of it left.
There is nothing like Nothing for imagining everything. There is
nothing so profoundly humbling as beholding the last of Nothing.